What Is Boiling in Home Beer Brewing?

Learn about boiling, a process used in brewing beer at home, from home brewer Chris Cuzme in this Howcast video.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Chris Cuzme. I am a long-time member and current president of the New York City Home Brewer's Guild. I've been home brewing since about 2001, and I love it. I'm crazy addicted to it, and I'm happy to share it with you today. I'm also part of the New York City Degustation Advisory Team which I formed with my partner, Mary Izett, NYCDAT.com. I'll be showing you how to home brew today. Cheers!

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Now we've gotten our wort to a nice rolling boil. Inside here is bubbling like mad, and protein is all coagulating and coming to the top. Most brewers only boil for 60 minutes, I tend to go on the 90 minutes side. What that means for me when I'm getting to the boil though, is also that I have to start with six and a half gallons instead of six gallons. About a gallon evaporates per hour. But if you are just doing a 60 minute batch, now or shortly after now would be when you put in your bittering hops. We've talked a little bit before about how hops come in three different forms. They come in whole leaf hops, they come in pellets; which are generally the most consistent, and they also come in hop plugs. Today we're just going to use pellets, and whole leaf. Pellets as bittering hop and pellets as a flavor, and then we are going to add a flame out. We're gonna throw in some whole leaf hops.

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So here we go, let the count down begin, 60 minutes from here. So 45 minutes have passed and we are gonna put in our flavor hops now. I just under an ounce of UK Ken Goldings. But also this time what I'm going to do is put in my method of cooling is to use a wort chiller. Now I've washed this, but by putting this in 15 minutes before the end of the boil or 45 minutes in, this will sanitize the wort chiller. And this way we don't risk any sort of contamination when we get to the end of the boil and when we start using it. But also at this time, we are gonna put in a little bit of Irish moss, about a table spoon of Irish moss. Now what this does is it helps for clarifying, it's a clarifying agent. It's really good for getting all the solids to kind of like settle at the bottom of your beer in the end.

60 Minutes have passed and we're ready to turn off our boil. Now is crunch time, this is the most dangerous part of our entire brew day. Now is the time in between our boil where everything is totally sanitized, and everything is totally; things are cranking , this is totally clean, nothing is wrong over here. Only thing we are scared of right now are these little floating crazy things that we can't even see but are everywhere, they're everywhere. Do not be fooled they're everywhere, they will kill your beer. Be scared, be very scared. Make this next part, make this cooling thing as fast as you can.

So we are going to turn off our brew kettle, turn off the flame. We are going to take our final hop addition. This , this hop bag has been sterilized. We are going to dump our whole leaf hops in here. And this is flame out, this is going to give us the aroma, the bouquet of our beer. We get it in at the same time as we go into the cooling process.